Releasing Walus was like spitting on Chris Hani’s grave
No political will from ANC-led government to confront apartheid past
ON FEBRUARY 4, 2015, I penned an opinion piece entitled “What about De Kock’s victims?”, just after the apartheid prime evil, Eugene de Kock, was released on parole by then Minister of Justice, Michael Masutha.
Driven by a deep-seated pain and agony and sympathy for the victims of many family members whose loved ones were brutally murdered by De Kock, I lamented this insensitive decision, which at the time seemed to both provoke and test the limits of our people’s resolve.
Later on I learnt that De Kock was actually getting paid approximately R40 000 a month and living a luxurious life, while the families of the people whom he mercilessly murdered continue to languish in squalor on the margins of society with no money.
All of this happened under the watch of the ANC government. What did we do to deserve this, I asked?
Livid at the decision of a state that had long lost its moral compass and the collective aspirations of our people, I sat in the dark corner of my bachelor flat in Observatory at the time, ruminating over the ludicrous decision taken by the state to release someone with so much blood on his hands back into the same society he once terrorised.
De Kock was unleashed back into society with all the white privileges he had had before he was arrested, and the nation did not act against this provocation. There was not even a public uproar and expression of dissatisfaction with the fact that the justice system had acted against the collective will of the majority of our people.
Today we have completely forgotten about De Kock and all the crimes he committed against humanity. He is probably sipping champagne and expensive wines, using taxpayers’ money given to him by the state to pat him on his back for the apartheid crimes he committed.
Come the 2024 general elections, our people will not have forgotten how the ANC has sold them out in order to protect the interests of white minorities at the expense of the black majority. How did it come to this, that we have become a docile people who are numb to the very pain that brought us here?
Seven years after the release of De Kock, the state once again under an ANC president, this time Cyril Ramaphosa, has released a killer. Janusz Walus, a Polish immigrant who gunned down Chris Hani outside his home in Boksburg on April 10, 1993, has been released on parole by the Constitutional Court led by Chief Justice Raymond Zondo.
Hani carried the hopes, dreams and collective aspirations of our people, as the leader of the SACP and a former MK commander in whom millions of landless masses of our people saw a fearless leader with political will.
He was the crème de la crème of his generation, and a leader par excellence, who articulated our collective pain with firm astuteness and care.
On that fateful day, April 10, 1993, we lost a leader and father of the nation who would have taken us out of the misery of this perpetual landlessness and despair.
The image of his lifeless body, with blood gushing out of the bullet wounds inflicted on him by his assassin, is still too much to bear, for his life was cut short few months before the dawn of democracy in South Africa.
His assassins knew how much was invested in Hani and they also knew that one day he would become the president of the country and put in place policies that would restore the dignity of the African people. That is why they assassinated him.
It was this assassination that gravitated the country closer to the brink of a civil war, a war that could have ended all wars, had it happened. The fragility of that moment would have probably got us closer to the realisation of the Latin phrase, “Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes”, meaning the War of All Against All.
The battlefield was set and the enemy knew that they had touched the people where it mattered most. From the side of the people, all that was required was a war call from the leadership to avenge the merciless killing of our leader.
But Nelson Mandela stood on national television and extinguished the burning fire that would have set us on a war path to rectify the injustices of the past.
The people felt betrayed.
The assassination of Hani was a direct provocation orchestrated by Afrikaner Broederbond right-wing nationalists who had in their possession the hit list of all our leaders whom they regarded as a threat that stood in their way as they tenaciously sought full control of the country’s affairs.
The Afrikaner Broederbond was, and still is, an ultra-secret right-wing white racist organisation that ran the affairs of the apartheid state and acted as its life blood and brain.
In the most beautifully recorded account titled The Super Afrikaners, with all the names of the members of the Broederbond, including the late FW de Klerk, Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom already warned us in 1978 that, “although it has only 12 000 scrupulously selected members, it plots and influences the destiny of all 25 million South Africans, black and white.
“By stealth and sophisticated political intrigue, this 60-year old organisation has waged a remarkable campaign to harness political, social and economic forces in South Africa to its cause of ultimate Afrikaner domination.”
They (Wilkins and Strydom) further argue that “the South African government (was) … the Broederbond and the Broederbond (was) the government”.
There was no top leader of the apartheid state who was not a member of the Broederbond. It was this same Afrikaner Broederbond-led government that on the eve of South Africa’s democratic dispensation shredded all documents that were in state institutions in order to get rid of evidential material that implicated judges, magistrates, bankers, businesses, property owners, senior politicians, and international conglomerates that supported and were embroiled in the apartheid machinery.
In Terry Bell and Dumisa Ntsebeza’s Unfinished Business, we get the sense that the apartheid state had destroyed all evidential material so we would not know the full extent of the genocide to which the nationalist government was willing to go in order to protect white domination and privilege in South Africa.
Those destroyed documents, hard drives and floppy discs would have given us deeper insight into the medical experiments that were conducted on our people, as well as how oranges and other products were injected with the HIV/Aids virus and cholera, then spread in black townships with the intention of depopulating the country of black people.
Behind locked doors of government offices, boardrooms of big pharmaceutical companies and scientific research institutions, nefarious decisions were taken to discuss the depopulation programme of black people in South Africa.
To this day, we will never know about the finer details of notorious cardiologist Wouter Basson’s top-secret Project Coast, which was an apartheid-era chemical and biological weapons programme that sought to clandestinely sterilise blacks without them knowing, so as to curtail their numerical majority.
White South African racists have long regarded black people as their permanent enemies, and there is nothing that black people can do to change the psyche of a racist who still treat blacks as if they are the children of a lesser God.
There is a general sentiment among the dejected masses of our people that had the country opted for the Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes route, racists would never have undermined the olive branch that was extended to them during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
But the TRC itself was another problem, which from its onset was designed to appease the sensibilities of the apartheid perpetrators and further dehumanised the victims of apartheid crimes, for it was reconciliation without justice. It provoked and exposed our vulnerability but never led us to any justice at all.
As Bell recounts, “behind the façade of time constraints and managerial shortcomings, some intended investigations never proceeded, others were bungled”. There was just no political will from the ANC-led government to confront the apartheid past, and that lack of political will has over the years emboldened the white supremacist establishment.
With the benefit of hindsight and justice for Hani and many of our heroes and heroines who were brutally murdered by apartheid, perhaps we should have taken the Nuremberg route that the German people took, and put these racists on trial for the heinous crimes they committed against humanity.
And this would have sent out a strong message to those who dare undermine the patience of our people.